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Kinect Setup on Mac OSX El Capitan

Since the initial plan of the project was to use a Kinect to track the user’s hand motion to get accurate data, I was setting it up to run on my MacBook Pro. A few weeks later, my advisor advised to design a simpler system. Hence the decision to use Pixy camera vision sensor instead.

Setting up the Kinect on OSX (El Capitan)

With Apple buying out PrimeSense, installing the Kinect on OSX has become a little fumbly. Here’s a step by step guide on getting it up and running.

Disable System Integrity Protection

System Integrity Protection (SIP) is a new default security measure introduced by Apple in OS X 10.11 onward. This rootless feature prevents Mac OS X compromise by malicious code, therefore locking down specific system level locations in the file system. This prevents the user from making changes to the system via Sudo commands. Therefore in order for us to proceed, we need to turn it off.

Restart your Mac in Recovery mode

Restart your Mac holding down Cmd-R

Find Terminal in the Utilities menu and type in the following : csrutil disable

First we have to download a few libraries in order to get the USB port on your Mac working with the Kinect. If you haven’t got them already.

Go into Terminal and type:

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sudo port install libtool

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Next, install the development version of libusb. Type into Terminal:

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sudo port install libusb-devel +universal

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Install OpenNI

(Optional) Create a Kinect directory in Home to place all applications you’ll need to run the Kinect on the Mac.

Open up Terminal and type in:

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mkdir ~/Kinect

cd ~/Kinect

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As the download page from the Primesense website is not working. Here’s a link to the OpenNI unstable release. Do not try to Download OpenNI v2 beta as it relies solely on the Microsoft Kinect SDK which we cannot use. The version we are going to use is OpenNI SDK (V1.5.7.10)